Sunday, November 12, 2017

Bolsheviks Played Smaller Role and Others a Greater One in Defining Statehood in the Caucasus than Many Now Think

Paul
Goble

Staunton, November 12 – It is an
article of faith among many Russians that Lenin and the Bolsheviks set the
stage for the demise of the USSR by their creation of the non-Russian
republics; but such a view, historians say, overstates the ability of the
center to define the situation and underrates the role of others including the
peoples themselves.

No one disputes that the territorial
divisions in the former Soviet space lie behind many of the region’s current
problems – for a discussion of that, see kavkaz-uzel.eu/articles/312123/-- but there is now a lively debate
on how those divisions and the territorialization of nationality came into
existence (kavkaz-uzel.eu/articles/312239/).

At a regular seminar on “The
Caucasus in the Past and Present” held at MGIMO earlier this week, Russian
specialists discussed the process by which the three union republics in the south
Caucasus and the non-Russian autonomies in the north Caucasus came into
existence in the first years after the 1917 revolution.

All of them underscored a point that
is often lost: the Bolsheviks did not have the chance to draw whatever borders
they wanted but rather had to accept or at least seriously take into account
the actions of others, ranging from the local Muslim and Christian populations
to the anti-Bolshevik movement led in South Russia by General Anton Denikin.

Vadim Mukhanov, a specialist on the
region at MGIMO, pointed out that “the northern border of Georgia and now of
Abkhazia” was drawn not by the Bolsheviks but follows the ceasefire line
between the forces of the Georgian Mensheviks and Denikin’s White Armies. Other
borders have a similarly complex origin.

Some followed the borders of
pre-1917 gubernias, others reflected religious divisions that were transformed
during the Russian Civil War into ethnic ones. Indeed, in the words of one
speaker, Oleg Ayrapetov of Moscow State University, at that time “the words
Bolshevik and ethnic Russian were synonyms” for many in the Caucasus.

Lyudmila Gatagova of the Moscow
Institute of Russian History told the seminar that “after the Great October
Socialist Revolution, the center for a time was weak. Until then, the representatives
of the national movements simply didn’t have the physical opportunity to
manifest their separatism. They were not insane.”

As a result, she continued, “1917
was the beginning of a process of establishing nation states on the territory
of the empire. Therefore, the conflicts too acquired an inter-ethnic character”
although “earlier they were religious and feudal” in their definition.

Sergey Manyshev, a Daghestani who
also works at the Institute of History, said that Islam played a key role in
defining some of the states in the North Caucasus, especially Chechnya and
Daghestan, where Muslim leaders found themselves locked in a struggle with
socialists.

Mkihail Volkonsky, another Moscow
historian, agreed and stressed that in 1917, “the Muslims acted as a political
subject,” but later what were in fact “Muslim autonomies” were “divided by
ethnicity” and it was that redefinition rather than redrawing of lines that
created today’s “administrative-political subjects, the national republics.”

Unfortunately, Manyshev said,
discussing such things in Daghestan has been made difficult by the insistence
of officials there that scholars should focus on the Caucasian War of the 18th
and 19th centuries rather than on the first years of Soviet
power.That needs to change if people are
to understand just who created the republics and why.